His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 170

12:06 Mon, Nov 20

Chapter 170

Malachi

She found the message at noon, on the ridge above the trading post.

She went up every day at noon now. It had been her idea. Teague drove her down as far as the turn, and she climbed the last half mile on foot, through the trees, to a flat gray rock at the top were Liam) had said the signal was, and stood on it with the phone held up in her hand like someone looking for rain. Most days there was nothing. Some days there was a message from Abby, short and care, and she would read it three times and put the phone away and not say anything on the drive back!

That day I went with her. I don’t know why. Something in the air that morning. Ash had been restless since before dawn, pacing, lifting his head toward the north.

I stood at the bottom of the rock and watched her face while the phone found its two bars, and buzzed in her hand, and buzzed again.

She put it to her ear.

I watched her listen. I watched the color go out of her face, and then come back, all at once, high on her cheekbones. She listened to the whole thing. Then she took the phone away from her ear and

looked down at me.

“It’s Liam,” she said. “From last night.” She swallowed. “Abby saw her. During the binding. She says Cressida’s at the trappers’ camp.” She held my eyes. “She says there’s a waterfall. Frozen. Down a black rock face, at the bottom of the slope below the huts.”

Ash came up in me so hard I had to put my hand on the rock.

I knew that waterfall. I had stood at the foot of it, thirteen winters ago, with my breath freezing in my beard and Cressida beside me in her long coat, telling me that nobody in the world would ever find

us here.

“That’s the place,” I said.

***

We left the next morning, before light.

Teague drove us as far as the road went. That was most of a day, up and round the shoulder of the mountain on logging tracks nobody had cut back in thirty years, with the chains on and the truck grinding in first gear through drifts up to the bumper. Where the last track gave out, at the edge of a long white valley under the pass, he stopped.

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Teague looked at me for a moment. Then at Sloane. Then back at me.

moment

He didn’t say anything. He held out his good hand. I took it. His grip was hard, and lasted a moment longer than usual.

Then he got back into the truck, and turned it, very slowly, in the narrow space between the trees, and I heard it grinding away down the mountain for a long time after it was out of sight.

***

We walked the first day, and ran the second.

The snow in the high valley was too deep for her leg on foot, and too deep for me to carry her far So at the top of the first climb, on the second morning, we stripped and lashed the packs and let the

wolves come.

I had seen Rhea three times now. Once in the stone chamber, the first night, when they forced her up out of Sloane in front of all of them, stumbling and terrified. Once at the cabin, from the window, on the run Sloane had thought I hadn’t watched. And once in the high pasture behind the cabin, when Sloane had finally let her out in front of me on purpose, the week after the hut, and stood back with her arms folded, daring me to say anything.

I hadn’t said anything. I had only looked.

She was cream and gold, Rhea. Small and quick and clever-footed, with gold along her shoulders and spine like the light on the edge of a cloud. She favored the hind leg. She ran anyway, and she ran well, and on the long white slopes of the high valley she ran beside Ash with her ears pricked and her tail up, and every so often she would veer off and bound away through the deep drifts for no reason at all, and come back with snow on her nose, and Ash would shoulder her, very gently, back onto the line.

I felt him enjoy it. Every step. I didn’t tell him not to.

We ran until the light began to go. By then the valley had narrowed and turned east, and the slopes on either side had climbed into bare black rock streaked with snow, and somewhere ahead of us, up a side gully, Ash caught the smell he had been looking for since noon. Faint. Mineral. Wet. Warm.

He turned up the gully without asking me. Rhea followed.

***

The spring was where I remembered it.

A shallow pool in a fold of the black rock, half the size of the cabin, with the snow melted back from its edges in a ring and the steam going up off it into the cold blue dusk in long slow curls. The rock

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Sloane stood looking at the water with her arms wrapped round herself.

You didn’t tell me about this,” she said.

“I wasn’t sure it was still here.” I was pulling my boots on. “Cressida brought me through here, the first winter. She used to stop here every time. She said it was the only warm place in the mountains between here and the pass.” I stood up. “The water’s good for old injuries. Old bones. She swore by

it.”

Sloane didn’t say anything.

Her leg had been hurting her for the last two hours. I knew because Rhea had been taking the weight off it earlier and earlier on every stride, and because when she came back into her skin she had staggered, and caught herself on the rock, and pretended she hadn’t.

“I’ll make camp,” I said. “Under the overhang there. Get a fire going.” I picked up my pack. “If you want to go in, go in. I won’t look.”

She glanced at me. Something moved at the corner of her mouth.

“You’ve already seen everything,” she said. “Twice. Just now.”

“That was different.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.” I didn’t look at her. “It was. Go on. Before it’s dark.”

I went to the overhang and turned my back and started breaking up the dead juniper for the fire. I heard her undress behind me. Her boots, one and then the other. The rustle of wool. Then a gasp, and a long, broken sigh that I felt all the way down my spine, and the soft sound of water moving.

I kept my back turned and built the fire.

***

It was full dark when she said my name.

The fire was going by then, low and red under the rock, and I had the kettle on it and the food out of the pack, and I hadn’t turned round once. I had been very careful about that.

“Malachi.”

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“The water,” she said. “Come into the water. It’s warm. You’ve been running all day, the same as

“A pause. “I’m not asking for anything. I just don’t want to sit here on my own in the dark with you freezing over there with your back to me.”

I stood up. I turned round.

She was sitting in the middle of the pool with the water up to her collarbones, and the steamising all round her, and her hair wet and dark and coiled up on top of her head, out of the water. Her face was flushed pink with the heat. She was looking at me, very steadily, in the firelight.

I took my clothes off at the edge of the pool and got in on the far side from her.

The heat hit me like a hand. I hadn’t known how cold I was until it was gone, all at once, out of every muscle, out of the bones of my legs and my back and the old wounds in my shoulder. I sat down on the stones with the water up to my chest and let my breath out, very slowly, and closed my eyes.

When I opened them, she was watching me.

Neither of us said anything for a while. The steam went up between us. Above the gully, the stars were coming out, very bright, very far away, and the frost was spreading out over the rocks at the edge of the snow, and the fire under the overhang popped and settled.

“Does it still hurt?” I said. “Your leg.”

“Less.” She moved it under the water. “A lot less. She was right about that, at least.”

“She was right about a great many things,” I said. “That’s what made her dangerous.”

Sloane didn’t answer for a moment.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “If she’s there.”

“She won’t be.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know her.” I looked up at the black rock against the stars. “Abby saw her. Abby looked out through her eyes and saw where she was. And Cressida felt her do it. She’ll have been gone from there before the moon set.” I paused. “But she’ll have left in a hurry. And she always leaves something.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then I’m wrong.” I looked at her across the water. “And you go back. Down the gully, the way we

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“Sloane.”

“She said it quite calmly. “I told Ryan I’d be there. I told Kade. I told you, in that hut, in front of all of them. I’m not running down a gully and leaving you on your own with her.” Her chincame up. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”

No.

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer. She was right, and we both knew it.

***

After a while she moved.

She came across the pool toward me, slowly, through the water, with the steam parting round her shoulders. I didn’t move. I sat very still on the stones and watched her come. She stopped beside me. Not touching. A hand’s width away. Then she turned, and sat down on the stones next to me, with her shoulder almost against mine, and looked up at the stars.

I could feel the heat of her through the water. I didn’t look at her.

Her hand came up out of the water and rested against the side of her own neck. Just under her ear. Where her hair would have hidden it, if it hadn’t been pinned up out of the water. Her fingers moved over it, slowly, absently, the way you touch an old scar without knowing you’re doing it.

The mark.

I had made it. I had made it with her saying stop, and her hands shoving at my chest, and I hadn’t stopped. It had faded since. Healed into a pale ridged crescent, silvery in the firelight. I could see the shape of my own teeth in it.

“Does it still bother you?” I said.

She turned her head. “What?”

“The mark.”

She was quiet for a moment. Her fingers had stopped moving on it.

“No,” she said. “Not anymore.”

I looked at it.

I knew why I had done it. I had never once pretended to myself that I didn’t. She was mine. The bond had said so the first night, in that stone chamber, and I had believed it the way you believe the

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12:06 Mon, Nov 2

It hadn’t been love. I knew that too. I wasn’t going to tell her it had been.

And the worst of it was that I wasn’t sorry enough. Not for wanting it. Sitting beside her in the water, with her shoulder a hand’s width from mine, I knew that if I had my way, I would do it again. Tonight. Mark her, and make her mine, and have every wolf from here to the coast know it.

Only it wasn’t what she wanted. It never had been. That was the difference between then and now. Then, I hadn’t asked. Now, I knew what the answer was, and I wouldn’t ask.

And it wasn’t only that. It was something else, something I hadn’t let myself think until this moment, in the dark, in the steam. I didn’t only want to be the one who marked her. I wanted her to mark me. I wanted her teeth in my neck, her mark on me, there for anyone to see. I wanted to belong to her, the way the bond had always meant for us to belong to each other. Both ways. Complete

I had never wanted that from anyone in my life.

“Sloane,” I said. My voice had gone rough. “That night. When I-”

I didn’t know how I meant to finish it. That I was sorry. That I had been out of my mind, with Jax’s blood on my hands and the bond burning. That it didn’t excuse anything, and I knew it didn’t, and I would never ask her to-

She took my hand.